


Always the Same Wish

by GretchenSinister



Category: Guardians of Childhood & Related Fandoms, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, don't expect canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 07:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20272516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Or, yet another music based prompt.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eSk0o8iHro&playnext=1&list=PLCDE4EF818CCAECB6&feature=results_video this video is for a fanmade song for “My little pony: Friendship is magic.” But there’s parts of it that made me think of Pitch and his daughter, and I had a bittersweet image of Mother Nature remembering a happier time she had with her father, or vice versa, Pitch remembering vague flashes of the times he had with his daughter. I definitely recommend listening to the song in any case, even if you’re not necessarily a pony fan."When Seraphina spreads her powers as Mother Nature over the earth, she usually ends up taking the form of a little girl. She doesn’t like to think about why she does this, but she can’t avoid doing so. It all goes back to one day, one question, and one wish. Why hasn’t her father tried to speak with her?





	Always the Same Wish

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 10/7/2016.

It should be easy for Mother Nature to not think of the past. Her attention was spread through every cycle of the earth, all growing things, all ocean currents, all winds. Her mind touched in part all the millions, all the billions of individuals in all the species on the planet. For a consciousness and a power spread so far and so wide, there was no room for the past. Only the present, and dim and distant, the far, far future.   
  
And, in a sense, it _was_ easy for Mother Nature, for that power, to avoid thinking of the past. When that power spread throughout the world, it could concern itself with no individual in particular, not even the one that could direct it. But the one who could direct it never disappeared. The more Seraphina Pitchiner spread her powers throughout the world, the more her self remained. The more she had to exist as a single individual. The more she became subject to all the troubles of a human mind. Anger. Fear. Regret. Hopes that would never be fulfilled, but couldn’t be entirely eradicated.   
  
When she was alone like this, she often found herself walking through the world in the form of a little girl. She was always glad to be alone when she found herself in such a form, for it seemed to her the representation of everything about being only human, about being tied to the past, that she wished she could get rid of forever.  
  
When she was in the form of a little girl, she was the exact age to the day as she had been when she went to her mother and asked, “Mommy, why didn’t Daddy call us yesterday or today?” It was always that moment of asking that she went back to. Why then? Her mother hadn’t known the answer when Seraphina first asked. The worries and fears they had shared at that moment were old, familiar things, the ones they had grown used to during all the other times Kozmotis Pitchiner had been away at the front lines. They had nothing to do with the terrible news that had been brought in person a few days later.   
  
The messenger had told Seraphina to leave the room before he told her mother. Afterwards, she had hated the messenger for that. Not only had her mother had to listen to the awful story, but she had to say it out loud, make it that much more real, think hard about it to put it in words that Seraphina could understand. Did the messenger really think that her mother would keep it a secret from her? That her father, the Golden General, had been invaded and corrupted by all the fearlings in the prison planet, and was now sweeping through the galaxy leaving death and destruction in his wake?  
  
Such news could not be kept from anyone.  
  
Mother Nature gritted her teeth and slammed a tiny fist against a tree trunk. If she must be afflicted with memories, why these? She had grown up! She had learned to fly her own ship! She had worked so hard to renounce her father in a way that would convince the Golden Army to let her join! She had triumphed in battles against the encroaching darkness! Why not think of those? Why not take that taller form?  
  
Or, why not…why not let her return to a time when she was even younger? Why couldn’t she go back to the times when her father had been home, when she had been able to eat dinner between her parents, when her father had told her stories of the wondrous things he had seen on his journeys, when he had listened to everything to say about her own little adventures at home? Why couldn’t she go back to one of the moments when he picked her up and spun her around as soon as he stepped through the doorway of their home? Why could her form not be that small?  
  
The trees around her, the plants under her feet, the birds, the insects, the breeze—all the places where her power was diffused so thinly now, offered her no answer. She knew they would be able to offer none even if she gathered that power to herself and asked again. She knew this because she knew she had the answer with her already, even if she hated looking at it.  
  
Now that she was grown, and now that she was very, very old, she could look into her happy memories of her father and see everything about them, including things she had not consciously noticed as a child. She saw how exhausted Kozmotis had always been at home, how many topics he would not or could not speak of, and the bitter weariness, not hope, that suffused his voice when he spoke of the end of the war. She could hear the unease when he spoke of the Tsar, and her mother’s answering unease.  
  
What had happened at the prison planet had not been inevitable, but the seeds of it had been there for years. So she could not go to the time before, because there really was no time before. And she could not go to the time after, for every time after grew from that moment in which a little girl started to realize how very wrong things could be, how fragile her father could be.   
  
In the present, Seraphina wrapped her arms around herself and struggled to stay upright on small, trembling legs. How fragile indeed! Taken from her in so many ways while he was still himself, and then taken from her so—so finally! And yet not by death, not with the kindness of death, not to have his flesh melt away and his bones crumble to dust, not to be part of the natural path of all life! Oh, no, her father had to be taken and twisted. All she could do was mourn him, yet his image, his voice, his mannerisms inundated the media around her, while the things he said and did made him seem almost like the puppet of someone who hated him.  
  
Almost, but not enough. And here was where the hope came in, the terrible hope that there was enough of Kozmotis in Pitch to bring her father back.   
  
Seraphina sank to the ground. “I don’t need him,” she said in her little-girl voice. “It’s been thousands and thousands of years. I don’t need him.” She drew a small circle in the loose dirt. “He was only human. If he became human again he’d be gone in hardly more than an instant.” She pressed both her palms to the ground and bent her head. “If he became human again I could bury him. I could twine his bones with flowering vines and I would know—I would know why he did not try to speak to me.”  
  
This was a wish of Mother Nature-Seraphina, but Seraphina-in-herself could not tell. As far as her feelings told her, this was the same desire she had had since she first asked why her father hadn’t called, the same wish she could not see a way out of carrying with her until the very Earth itself wound down. 


End file.
